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E. M. Delafield

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E. M. Delafield
Delafield in 1925
Delafield in 1925
BornEdmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture
(1890-06-09)9 June 1890
Steyning, Sussex, England
Died2 December 1943(1943-12-02) (aged 53)
Resting placeKentisbeare, Devon, England
OccupationNovelist
Notable worksDiary of a Provincial Lady
Spouse
Arthur Paul Dashwood
​
​
(m. 1919)​
Children
Parents

Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood, née de la Pasture (9 June 1890 – 2 December 1943), commonly known as E. M. Delafield, was a prolific English author. She wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays, but is now best known for her largely autobiographical Diary of a Provincial Lady, the fictional journal of an upper-middle-class Englishwoman in a Devon village in the 1930s. Delafield is considered a master of the comedy of manners.[1]

Life

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Delafield was born in Steyning, Sussex. She was the elder daughter of Count Henry Philip Ducarel de la Pasture, of Llandogo Priory, Monmouthshire, and Elizabeth Lydia Rosabelle Bonham, daughter of Edward William Bonham, who as Mrs Henry de la Pasture was also a well-known novelist.[2] The pen-name Delafield adopted later was a thin disguise of "de la Pasture," suggested by her sister, Yoé.[3] The de la Pasture family was bilingual, and young Elizabeth was educated until age ten by a series of French governesses.[4] She then attended several convent schools until 1907, when she was seventeen.[5] Count Henry died suddenly of a heart attack the next year, when Delafield was entering the marriage market.[6] She was lively and charming but shy, so she “failed” as a debutante.[7] Her mother, meanwhile, found another husband for herself: Sir Hugh Clifford GCMG, who governed the colonies of the Gold Coast (1912–19), Nigeria (1919–25), Ceylon (1925–27), and the Malay States.[8] Sir Clifford is said to have been the inspiration for a character in Noel Coward’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen.[9]

In 1911, Delafield chose to pursue a religious life. She was accepted as a postulant by a French religious order established in Belgium.[10] Her account of the experience, The Brides of Heaven, was written in 1931 and eventually published in her biography. "The motives which led me, as soon as I was 21, to enter a French Religious Order are worthy of little discussion, and less respect," she begins. These motives appear to have included receiving only one marriage offer as a debutante.[11] She recounts being told by the Superior that if a doctor advised a surgical operation, "your Superiors will decide whether your life is of sufficient value to the community to justify the expense. If it is not, you will either get better without the operation or die. In either case you will be doing the will of God, and nothing else matters.”[12] Delafield finally left the convent when she learned that Yoé was planning to join another enclosed order: "The thought of the utter and complete earthly separation that must necessarily take place between us was more than I could bear.”

After the outbreak of World War I, she worked as a nurse in a Voluntary Aid Detachment in Exeter, under the command of Georgiana Buller.[13] Delafield's first novel, Zella Sees Herself, was published in 1917, the same year in which she decided to use the first name Edmée.[14] In the last two years of the war, she worked for the Ministry of National Service in Bristol and published two more novels.[15] Delafield continued to publish one or two novels every year until nearly the end of her life.[16]

On July 17, 1919, Delafield married Colonel Arthur Paul Dashwood, OBE, a younger son of Sir George Dashwood, 6th Baronet and Lady Mary Seymour, the youngest daughter of Francis Seymour, 5th Marquess of Hertford).[17] Dashwood was an engineer who had built the massive docks at Hong Kong Harbour. After two years of living with him in the Malay States, Delafield insisted on coming back to England, and they subsequently lived in Croyle, an old house in Kentisbeare, Devon, on the Bradfield estate, where Dashwood became the land agent.[18] They had two children, Lionel and Rosamund.[19] At the initial meeting of the Kentisbeare Women's Institute in 1924, Delafield was unanimously elected president and remained in that office until she died.[20] She also served as a Justice of the Peace from 1925.[21]

Delafield's son, Lionel, died in late 1940, some suggest by his own hand, a tragedy from which she never recovered. Her own health suffered a progressive decline, which necessitated a colostomy and many visits to a neurologist. Three years later, on December 2, 1943, Delafield died after collapsing while lecturing in Oxford. She was buried under her favourite yew tree in the Kentisbeare churchyard, near her son. Her mother survived her and died five years later. Her daughter, Rosamund Dashwood, emigrated to Canada.

Diary of a Provincial Lady

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When the editor of Time and Tide "wanted some light 'middles', preferably in serial form, Delafield promised to submit some pieces."[22] She later said: “The idea had come into my mind of writing, in the first-person singular, a perfectly straightforward account of the many disconcerting facets presented by everyday life to the average woman.[23] It was thus, in 1930, that her most popular and enduring work, Diary of a Provincial Lady, was written. This largely autobiographical novel substituted the names of "Robin" and "Vicky" for her own children.[24] The book has never been out of print and inspired several sequels chronicling later portions of Delafield's life: The Provincial Lady Goes Further, The Provincial Lady in America, and The Provincial Lady in War-Time.

In 1961, Delafield's daughter, Rosamund Dashwood, published Provincial Daughter, a semi-autobiographical account of her own experiences of domesticated life in the 1950s.

Reception

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Delafield was a respected and prolific author of middlebrow fiction in her day, along with such writers as Angela Thirkell and Agatha Christie.[25] Of her novels, only the Provincial Lady series achieved wide commercial success (The Diary of a Provincial Lady was a Book Society Book of the Month in December 1930).[26] However, Delafield’s contributions to magazines such as Time and Tide and Punch, which published over four hundred of her pieces, gained her great fame in the United Kingdom. She also was popular in the United States and went on two successful speaking tours there in the 1930s.[27]

Delafield’s status in Britain was such that in the early days of World War II the BBC asked her to broadcast a reassuring series called Home Is Like That,[28] and the future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan persuaded her to bring her beloved diarist out of retirement for a series later published as The Provincial Lady in War-Time.[29] Delafield’s status in England was also reflected in the BBC’s decision to announce her death on its Six O’Clock News.[30] Punch commented: “Many Punch readers have realized since her death that it was the article by E. M. Delafield that instinctively they read first each week…and they didn’t realize till now, when those articles have ceased, what a blank their absence would leave.”[31]

The critic Rachel Ferguson suggested that Delafield wrote too much and that her work was uneven, though Ferguson considered The Way Things Are a "completely perfect novel," suggesting in 1939 that Delafield's "humour and super-sensitive observation should make of her one of the best and most significant writers we possess, a comforting and timeless writer whose comments will delight a hundred years hence."[32] The Times opined that Delafield was a “genuine if modest genius” of her craft. Cynthia Zarin credits Delafield with creating the modern humorous diary. J. B. Priestley called her the equal of the best English female humorists, including Jane Austen, and allocated five pages to her in English Humor (1976). The critic Henry Canby attributed her lack of “resounding” critical success to her unpretentiousness, saying she was “one, who, like Jane Austen, seems to write easily on her lap, while others talk and clamor about her.”[33] Faye Hamel argued of the Provincial Lady that “enormous skill, subtlety, and power of selection have gone to create this seemingly mild and commonplace character."[34] And Maurice McCullen has opined that Delafield’s “strength as a humorist argues most strongly for a place in English literature.“[35]

Books

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  • Zella Sees Herself (1917)
  • The War Workers (1918)
  • The Pelicans (1918)
  • Consequences (1919; republished in 2000 by Persephone Books)
  • Tension (1920)
  • The Heel of Achilles (1920)
  • Humbug (1921)
  • The Optimist (1922)
  • A Reversion to Type (1923)
  • Messalina of the Suburbs (1924) - based on the Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters murder case of 1922
  • Mrs Harter (1924)
  • The Chip and the Block (1925)
  • Jill (1926)
  • The Entertainment (1927) - short stories
  • The Way Things Are (1927; republished in 1988 by Virago Press)
  • The Suburban Young Man (1928)
  • What Is Love? (1928; published in America as First Love)
  • Women Are Like That (1929) - short stories
  • Crouchback (1929) - based on the life of Anne Neville, wife of Richard III of England
  • Turn Back the Leaves (1930)
  • Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930)
  • Challenge to Clarissa (1931)
  • The Provincial Lady Goes Further (1932)
  • Thank Heaven Fasting (1932; republished in 1989 by Virago Press)
  • Gay Life (1933)
  • General Impressions (1933) - humorous articles originally published in Time and Tide
  • The Provincial Lady in America (1934)
  • The Brontës: Their Lives Recorded by Their Contemporaries (1935)
  • The Bazalgettes (1936)
  • "Faster! Faster!" (1936)
  • As Others Hear Us: A Miscellany (1937) - humorous sketches originally published in Punch and Time and Tide
  • Nothing Is Safe (1937)
  • Ladies and Gentlemen in Victorian Fiction (1937)
  • Straw Without Bricks: I Visit Soviet Russia (1937; published in America as I Visit the Soviets)
  • Three Marriages (1939) - novellas
  • Love Has No Resurrection (1939)
  • The Provincial Lady in War-Time (1940)
  • No One Now Will Know (1941)
  • Late and Soon (1943)

Drama

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See also

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References

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  1. ^ Maurice L. McCullen, E.M. Delafield, p. 62 (1985.
  2. ^ Violet Powell, The Life of a Provincial Lady: A Study of E.M. Delafield and Her Works, pp1-2 (Henemann, 1988).
  3. ^ Tanya Izzard, E.M. Delafield and the Feminist Middlebrow, p.32 (Ph.D. dissertation, 2014) quoting "E.M. Delafield," in Beginnings, p.74 (Thomas Nelson, 1935).
  4. ^ Powell, p.6.
  5. ^ McCullen, p.2. See also Kathy Mezei, "E.M. Delafield," in Modernist Archives Publishing Project, http://modernistarchives.com/person/e-m-delaifield[permanent dead link].
  6. ^ Powell, p.7
  7. ^ Powell, pp.7-9, and McCullen, “Chronology.”
  8. ^ Powell, pp. 9-10.
  9. ^ Cynthia Zarin, “The Diarist” in "'The New Yorker (Vol. 81, No.12, May 9, 2005).
  10. ^ Powell, p.12.
  11. ^ Powell, pp.14.
  12. ^ Powell, p.22.
  13. ^ Powell, p.32
  14. ^ Powell, p.33.
  15. ^ Powell, pp. 37-38
  16. ^ “E.M. Delafield” in Encyclopedia of British Women’s Writing 1900-1950, p.66.
  17. ^ Powell, pp.16-18
  18. ^ Powell, pp.50-55.
  19. ^ Powell, pp. 46, 54.
  20. ^ Powell, p.61.
  21. ^ Powell, p.56.
  22. ^ Powell, pp.73-75
  23. ^ Mather, p. 33.
  24. ^ Mather, p.39..
  25. ^ Mezei
  26. ^ Powell p.99.
  27. ^ Zarin. See also McCullen, Chronology.
  28. ^ Mezei
  29. ^ Powell, p.165.
  30. ^ Powell, p. 185.
  31. ^ Helen Walasck, "E.M. Delafield and Punch" in “Books,” Albion Magazine Online (Summer, 2019) http://www.albionmagazineonline.org (Archive).
  32. ^ Rebecca Ferguson Passionate Kensington (1939)
  33. ^ Mather, p.44, quoting Henry Seidel Canby, "The Diary of a Provincial Lady", Saturday Review of Literature, p.376, Jan. 14, 1933.
  34. ^ Faye Hammer, "Wildest Hopes Exceeded: E.M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady" in Women Celebrity, and Literary Culture Between the Wars (University of Texas Press, 2007).
  35. ^ McCullen, p.122.

Further reading

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  • Maurice L. McCullen (1985, 143 pages), E. M. Delafield, Twayne ISBN 0-8057-6899-8
  • The life of a provincial lady/Violet Powell. (Heinemann, 1988) 190 pages. ISBN 0-434-59958-1
  • The heirs of Jane Austen/Rachel R. Mather. (Peter Lang, 1996) ISBN 0-8204-2624-5 (Treats E M Delafield, EF Benson and Angela Thirkell)
  • "The Diarist; How E. M. Delafield launched a genre," The New Yorker, May 9, 2005, page 44, 3903 words, by Cynthia Zarin
  • Dictionary of National Biography
  • Tanya Izzard, E.M. Delafield and the Feminist Middlebrow (Ph.D. dissertation, 2014).
  • Kathryn Hugs, The Diary of a Provincial Lady (in the “I Wish More People Would Read” column) The Guardian, MY 11, 2020.
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